


stories so old you just tend to keep them

by half_a_league



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Fae & Fairies, Fairy Tale Elements, M/M, Morgue Files
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-12
Updated: 2018-04-12
Packaged: 2019-04-21 19:51:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14292180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/half_a_league/pseuds/half_a_league
Summary: There’s only so much belief left in the world, stolen away between now and the days where they danced drunk and wild under the earth, and a world where no one believes in them is both a world where it’s harder to live, but easier tohide.





	stories so old you just tend to keep them

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Gregory and the Hawk's "Stone Wall, Stone Fence". Source material belongs to Marvel and whoever owns Marvel, etc. Hot mess warning--this work is so unbeta'd that it was literally just copy-pasted from chat logs into a google doc over three years ago, and only mildly tweaked before it saw the light of day.

The New World is no place for magic, and New York is not a sweet green land of hills that could hold a thousand different sons, a thousand different homes. Steel girders rise over brick buildings, iron buried inside the beams, bones buried under busy feet. 

New York is the home of dreams and chance and fresh beginnings, but harbors no home to magic, not the kind that comes calling in blood. Not the kind that burns until there’s an answer. 

Everybody knows that Sarah Rogers has the strongest hands on the block, cool when you have a fever, warm when you have the chills, and every bandage she ties stays in place and every suture she sews doesn’t come undone, so no one says anything when they catch her in the half light and each of her slim fingers has one too many knuckles and her face is too sharp, too sweet to bear. Her smile is apologetic, comforting, kind, until that moment when the shadows fall a little deeper over her delicate bones, and honey turns to ash in your mouth.

Everybody knows that Sarah Rogers married Joseph Rogers, who died in the Great War,. Joseph whose back was like a lean rise of granite and whose hands were always steady and whose smile was always sure. They said that he died pulling another man to safety, and it's the mustard gas and the adrenaline and the fear and pain and terror, but that man swears until his dying day that Joseph Rogers was as tall as a giant and shining gold like the sun.

_A hallucination_ , the doctors all say. _His sight was already going_ , the nurses whisper. But he presses his bandaged eyes to the cool of his pillow, shaking and shaking, and insists that Joseph died with a crown on his brow.

And Sarah Rogers gives birth alone, or nearly, laid out on a ratty blanket on a hardwood floor, pushing silently, her mouth a grim, pained line, and Steven Grant Rogers slides into the world, into the midwife’s waiting hands with no noise but his own to herald his arrival. There is no pushing crowd outside the room to see his face, no arms but his mother’s to greet him. 

She takes him from the midwife, and pulls him to her breast, and she touches his bloody head, the soft golden down, the harsh cut of his cheekbones as he wails.

The midwife rises from her crouch, and leaves within the hour, and no one sees her milky skin, almost blue, and no one sees the baby’s kicking legs, curled fists, all of them too long and lean.

And he grows, from the curled lump against her chest to a sweet, small boy, her beautiful golden boy, with a tow head and eyes like pieces of the sky.

And she knows the city is bad for him, knows in her heart that the iron bones around them do no favors, no matter how deeply they’re buried, and the smoke eases no breathes in those small lungs, but they can’t afford to go anywhere else. 

So her steady hands find them a home, and her sweet smile draws people around them, moths to a flame, and they make do.

( _Make do_ , Joseph snarled into his hands, the bottle in shatters on the floor. _They used to worship us, used to send us their daughters and sons, their grain and gold, and now I can’t even feed my own damn wife_.

And she smoothed her hands down his back, took his aches into herself when she pulled away, and kneels at his feet to pull the shards of glass out one by one. 

There’s only so much belief left in the world, stolen away between now and the days where they danced drunk and wild under the earth, and a world where no one believes in them is both a world where it’s harder to live, but easier to _hide_.)

She teaches her son that, both of them crowded close behind closed doors, but a boy with fire in his eyes and a calling in his blood doesn’t always listen.

He still has his father's strength and his mother's love, and a way to his steps that speak of royalty _somewhere_ inside him, but his hands, small and talented, are just a boy’s hands, and his back is no more rock that his stubborn head, and she wonders about him sometimes, growing up sick and twisted and weak until one day he comes home with red all down his shirt, trailing a boy who grins at her sharp and feral, a mouth like a dirty slash across his face.

And then Sarah Rogers can see it, the evidence of his father’s strength in his twisted back and his proud chin, and his hands might carry a storm within those fists, but the crown is sure and steady on his brow. Blood calls and burns until it’s outed; she knows that little can keep it hidden, and now Bucky Barnes sees it too. 

* * *

And they grow up like that—teeth, blood, bone, bond—until Sarah Rogers dies.

The doctors say she caught TB working in the ward. The nurse says she wasted away coughing up blood and burning in her own skin, but afterward cannot look her son in the eye as he sits by the silent bedside. She leaves, hand over her mouth, running from the glare.

Steve Rogers kneels at his mother's deathbed, and all of him clamors in a righteous rage. He sends Bucky Barnes to stand guard at the door—Bucky, not understanding why Steve wants him to, but doing it anyway in that unwavering way of his, goes— and Steve rolls his mother's cool body over, tears at the thin dress they'de put her in. He sees the lumps on her back, and quickly digs out four iron slivers from under the thin, pale skin. In doing so, he burns his fingers, his palms, so badly that he can't bear to hold a pencil or pen for over a month.

Even in the new world, there are people who covet them. Even in the new world, there are people who hurt them. The only difference is, there isn't the pad of surety, of belief, to temper the pain.

* * *

And then the war comes on.

And Bucky is drafted, or Bucky volunteers, or Bucky sees the want for fire and wrath in Steve's eyes and can't stay and watch it grow any longer, and he leaves. 

The unfairness of it burns in Steve, stronger than the smoke-burn, stronger than the iron-burn. Steve who was born for war, Steve with the crown his father put upon his head, is trapped still in his weak body, in his poisonous home.

Then Steve finds the one man who can also look inside him and see the warrior, the sun-man, the hill king. This man, too, is the worthiest of men, and in him there is a kindressness—neither of them have been acknowledged of their worth.

This is little comfort in the iron chamber, his arms and legs and chest and heart burning. They pump Steve full of poison and magic and science and flood his body with things barely understood—

—and he comes out lit like the sun and perfect in all ways. There is oaken girth in his limbs, and the metal doesn't burn to touch his skin, and he's light on his feet like a gust of wind, and the creeping coil of strength in his body winds and winds and never manages to spend itself to the full.

But here is the price, one thing for another—his doctor dies on the floor of the room under that little shop in Brooklyn, and his magic and his science and his wonder at the world is lost. A nurse crouches in his office and burns the papers, her pupils slit vertical in the dirty electric light.

And Steve Rogers takes to the stage.

And Steve Rogers takes to his crown.

And then Steve Rogers takes to the war.

* * *

In the filthy forests of Germany and Italy and France the barrows king comes alive, and he's the spirit dog at the front of the chase, those devil foxes fleeing before him, and Bucky watches Steve's terrible grasping light, doesn't let himself fall easily into the orbit, and the Howling Commandos don't understand why he sits in the dirt, laughing like a ragged broken thing when they tell him their new unit's name.

The hounds of the hunt, reborn into men's eager bodies.

Bucky Barnes follows always a step behind, letting the shield lead them forward, letting the man behind it dance and throw and weave them into danger again 

and in the fierce cold, he crouches in the tent, healing from wounds no man should be able to recover from

and Steve presses a burning hand to Bucky's forehead and watches with eyes that turn liquid, turn gold, turn red and shine in the flickering lights of the fire 

and Bucky wonders _what did they do to me_

and when the pistol holds steady in Steve's hand, no blisters to kiss the new flesh, and when bones knit and blood spills unending like wine, he thinks with a bigger, more spiraling dread _what did they do to him_

and then, before he can ask, before they can curl together like the untested pups they used to be, pressed against the blankets, against the floorboards, against the dry, crackling grass and the filthy pavement in the evening, and each other, always each other

there is Zola, and there is the train.

and Bucky falls feeling the wind around him like a curse. When he looks at the sky, there is only clouds. The sun has gone. 

Then the plane, a terrible hulking metal bird, unnatural like nothing has ever been before, and Steve fights like a demon, like a man possessed, and his sweetness, his mother's cool hands are burned from him now, that part fell in the ice long before his body hit the water, before the plane hit the water,

and he is his father's wrath and temper and Hydra feels the flames

and he cuts one head off and two will grow to take its place

and he is the torch that burns the flesh before it can grow

and he is teeth, blood, bone, 

but plane carries a poison of all living things, and the radio crackles with the voice of the woman he was learning to love and the great cold maw of ice opens and swallows the metal bird, and like a ghost blowing out a candle, out gusts the fire inside it, smoke and all.

* * *

When Steve wakes up, he knows the wrongness, lets it sit on his skin like ash after a fire, like snow after a storm, like a shard after a broken bottle.

He thinks ambush.

He thinks trap.

Later, standing in the dazzling lights of the city that is no longer his home, he wonders if that could have been worse.

They give him back the shield, and a new uniform, bright colors like a painted child's picture, and he runs a hand through his coin-gold hair and cannot remember the feel of the hunt, the clean chase, the sharp kill. The exhausted, panting afterwards of dogs rolling in blood and baying triumph at the sky, licking gore from each other's coats.

When the sky opens up, he loses his chance for ever mourning it.

They give him the new Stark and the spider and the hawk and the lightning god who looks at Steve like he sees something he knows.

_Here is your team_ , they say, and he is no longer a perfect hound among hounds.

Nothing can hide the crown at his brow now. Steve leads and they follow him—if only just—and sometime after the battle, sitting in the rubble waiting for his stomach to seal itself back up, waiting for the swoop of hot blood to abait, he realizes that the future is different but the fighting, the killing, is the same. He runs as one now instead of many but there is still something to put his teeth into at the end of the chase.

(Somewhere in the private reaches of the mews, the hawk sets aside his bow and removes the arrows one by one from his quiver until all that's left is the one that the captain would not touch when he helped gather them, and the spider in her corner, high in the web, catches his glittering eye.)

Then there is the man with a face like a brick, who understands hounds, who needs soldiers, and who can tolerate kings, and he offers steve a place at his table and serving of the meat and a horn of the mead.

The man who is the king of kings sends Steve to a place where there's green again, nothing like the hills in his bones, but it soothes the dying twitches and eases the roll of his shoulders when he tries to shake off the iron-boned oppressiveness of a city that has grown and grown and forgotten the bones beneath it, and the beliefs that built it, and the people who had lived among it.

It's a good enough exchange for a man with crown but no court. Steve goes where he's told (sometimes) and does what he's told (rarely) and as a reward they give him another set of hounds to run with and hunt with.

But these are snappish dogs and lean from starving and strangely shaped, and their muzzles are always peeling back from snarls. Their bays sound like the high electrical whine of weapons used too often, and Steve flinches and turns from them, hands by his side instead of out-stretched like they were too long ago, in the hush of the forests, in the silent desperation of the war. Those are teeth that would tear off the hand that wants to feed them, slavering in red-flecked muzzles and there is no companionship to be found here.

The agitation mounts.

And when, finally, the enemy at the gates slips inside, is found inside, the fox hidden as a hen in the coops, he feels relief break like cool water across his back

until

until

the doors to the kennels are open, and the wolves comes out howling—

—and he runs the silk-webs, the fae roads that the spider lays for him, her spinneret running out of silk just a step too soon, and Steve feels nothing under his skin, not the crown, not the gold, not the strong blood or sharp teeth or even the bones like veins of deep and glittering ore

and the hunting bird comes to Steve's outstretched hand, unhooded, untethered, and darkens the sky with his wings, blots out the sun, races against him, 

and the last wolf outside the door breaks free of his muzzle

and lets the world see his face.

**Author's Note:**

> honestly, guys, i don't even know. this sat as one of 26 untitled google docs for three to four years, then i recovered it as i was going through renaming everything properly. it was basically completed, so i just unfucked the formatting and posted it here. it's not my only captain america fic, but it is the only one that ever got completed, and likely the only one i'll ever post, and i'm still slightly bitter it was this one as opposed to the one that was just a crackfic with a bunch of puns about bucky's lost skeleton arm. anyways! yikes @me, and i'll be over here in the corner


End file.
